Stormbringers!
by utterpretension
Summary: A 24th-century gonzo journalist covers the exploits of his big brother's champion Tournament team.


There's two minutes and twenty nine seconds left on the clock in the 2381 Liandri Tournament Capture The Flag Championship, and my brother's guts have just been splattered over the spring plains of Facing Worlds.

In the Coliseum, the atmosphere is typically so loud they have to install sound dampening fields between sections so the spectators don't go home with hearing damage. Right now though, it's so quiet I can hear the fat bastard beside me fight his collapsing lungs for another breath.

The defending champions – the team I will always, in my heart, be rooting for, journalistic bias be damned – are the Stormbringers, captained by my brother Ben. They're up against Salem's Dragoons, the number one contenders this year, a team whose strong showings have gotten consistently stronger with each passing season.

The Stormbringers are defending their title for the third year running. This win will prove to every fan of the Tournament, every feedsite author, every pundit and critic, that they are undisputedly the kings of Liandri Capture the Flag, their dynasty cemented for all time. They're the crowd favourites. They're unbeatable.

And they're losing.

My name is Thomas Kadach. Just call me Tom, don't bother with my last name – it's pronounced "kuh-DAH", for the record, and you clip the H and kind of phlegm it, and I'm awful tired of getting "KA-ditch" or "ka-DATCH". People keep asking me if I have Skaarj blood in me. Seriously. It's a German name. Anyway.

Slowly but surely, human players are getting phased out of the Liandri Tournaments. It's not for want of ability, though as the programming of 'bots gets better and better, and Skaarj recruits get bigger and meaner, and the juice they pump into the arteries of Juggernauts makes them uglier and nastier – that starts to become a part of it. Fact is, the human physiology is not designed to withstand the rigours of Tournament play. Constant respawning takes its toll on the psyche; the brain is not meant to die more than once. An average player with a five-year contract might retire younger than any professional sport of yore, with enough zeroes in his credit banks to treat his whole extended family like kings for generations. Which is good, because there's a whole list of other retirement bonuses those young men and women pick up: Alzheimer's. Dementia. Sociopathy. Manic depression. Most are dead by forty of a massive stroke, heart attack, or their own hand. Typically by then, the game-watching public has forgotten their name.

But the game-watching public is overwhelmingly a human public, and human people like to see human faces, so the allure of a human team is not lost on Liandri. Even so, the Stormbringers are one of the last few teams in the Tournament to be all-human. The fact that they're reigning champs just seals the deal. The public loves them, and Liandri loves the public's money, and all is well.

Only they're about to be dethroned.

Ben respawns, the irreparable damage to his body forgotten in the flash of a bio-pattern buffer bringing him back to wholesome life. Immediately, Curse and Raptor are by his side, cogs in the well-oiled machine that brings the Stormbringers their myriad successes. Twilight defends in the tower, crouched up against a pillar, scanning the interweaving tracts of plains that make up Facing Worlds with a sniper rifle. As I watch through her view, she removes the head of a Salem's Dragoon. I once saw her shoot the power cell out of the shock rifle my brother was holding in a practice session. With skills like that, head shots that travel the length of a football field are practically a warmup.

Panic and Mage take up the rear, their rocket launcher and flak cannon combination enough to stonewall any attempt on the red flag they've worked so hard to earn the right to defend. In a sense, they are the true embodiment of the Stormbringers' title defense, prepared to give their lives to keep the flag safely in its socket.

Giving their lives wasn't enough for the duo once this game, though, and once was all it took. With 1:30 left on the clock, the Stormbringers are 0-1 and facing down the end of their title run, the most bitter defeat imaginable.

Ben – the fans know him by Baldr and so that's what I'll try to refer to him as – heads what may be the final charge towards victory across the very plains that hold his charred and blasted remains. I'll never know just how it feels to run amongst your own intestines, which suits me just fine. Curse and Raptor are hot on his heels on either side, and Twilight provides the high ground.

The Salem's Dragoons are heading a similar charge to seal their victory. They meet in the middle.

The air itself screams, filled with the maelstromic mixes of a hundred different vessels of high-velocity death. If you're watching the view from one of the players caught in the middle, like I am, the screeches in your earpiece as the audio compensators attempt to emulate the cacophony are enough to threaten you with deafness. Shards of shrapnel the size of baseballs sear at white-hot temperatures into the flesh of the players on either side, while high-frequency laser blasts from shock rifles sizzle the air and melt through Liandri armour. A rocket disembowels a Salem's Dragoon.

Three things happen in that moment: Twilight, her usual battlefield cool compromised by the intense stress of the championship game, gets her skull vented by a Dragoon player who had crept up to his own tower while the Stormbringer sniper was distracted by the melee in the middle of the playing field. Raptor is wiped out by a point-blank plasma ball that melts the flesh off of his bones.

And the clock slips under one minute.

Baldr, yelling primally, blows away the last Salem's Dragoon as he and a badly wounded Curse thunder down the path towards the blue flag. I'm watching through his eyes now and I hear his scream of rage in my own ears as though my brother was standing next to me. He's down two teammates and there's no time to go back and regroup, to let them rearm, to catch their breath.

There's no time for anything but to keep moving and pray.

* * *

><p>What the fans know, what the players know, what I know and what you should know by now is that a tie when the clock runs out in a championship Capture the Flag game means that the win is snagged by the defending champs. It's been a long-debated rule and its legitimacy has been called into question many times, but the reasons behind it are simple. Liandri wants its champions to succeed. Legacies are good for the sport. If you can't decisively beat the champion, you don't deserve their title. Pretty clear, right?<p>

Only what's keeping everyone so quiet in this colossal arena, what's held on the tip of everyone's tongue tight enough to create a vacuum is that even if Salem's Dragoons lose this in a tie, they snagged their decisive victory. If the Stormbringers manage to score and tie up the game, they'll have barely hung onto their title, having been sorely beaten for most of the twenty-minute game by the top contender.

After that, it's pretty easy to predict what will happen. Dragoons fans will call bullshit, that their team lost on a technicality, and maybe they'll be right to. They'll gather steam on chatfeeds and newslogs, their vitriol infectious and building in the whole game-watching public until nearly everyone with a feed and a pulse will be baying for the blood of the Stormbringers and kicking down Liandri's door for a rematch.

And look, man, it's fucking hard to argue with people that vocal about the games, you know? It makes sense on some level, since the Tournament feeds on primal instincts to fight and conquer, and what is fighting and conquering if not dominating your foe? And if you can't dominate your foe, how can you really be said to be winning? So after a while, if you're really a fan of the games for the "right reasons", the primal reasons, you'll be swayed to the challengers' side. It's just what happens.

So even if the Stormbringers win tonight, they can't really win. Raw deal, huh? The fact is that when you're the champ, everyone wants to see you lose except your fans, and you lose some of them to the new up-and-comers with each passing day.

* * *

><p>There's blood in my brother's eyes. That's what gets me back in the moment, turns my knuckles back to white and catches my breath back in my throat. There's blood in my brother's eyes, because the spectator camera implanted behind his retina gets smeared and then goes dark and there's a quick "Signal Lost" error on a black screen before I'm watching the overview of the field again like most of the fans probably are. Impatiently, I zoom in and follow my brother manually. There's a nasty cut across his forehead that's bubbling blood into his eyes.<p>

Behind him, Curse struggles to keep pace, a nasty black scar in his armour that seems to bite down into his flank underneath. Curse is a huge man, six-and-a-half feet, easily, and it doesn't take much for his legs to keep up with Ben, but when you've followed the Stormbringers as long as I have, you can tell he's hurt. There's a determination near to the point of mania keeping his eyes open and the barest innuendo of a limp in his long, warrior strides. They drug Tournament competitors up to the eyeballs to keep them alert and fighting even when on the verge of death, pump them full of adrenal stimulants and serotonin inhibitors and artificial endorphins, but all the needles and focus in the world can't completely numb the pain of a gaping wound in your side.

Baldr and Curse make it to the foot of the Dragoons' tower just barely ahead of their respawning opponents. The fierce fighting inside is messy and brief. The defending Dragoons are tough. Curse and my brother are tougher. They chew through the opposition with flak and plasma, and the captain of the Stormbringers, for the first time in the game, gets his hands on the opponent's flag.

Except now, they're cut off and outnumbered with nowhere to go.

The three remaining Salem's Dragoons crowd the doorway, their armoured footsteps clanking onto the stone-brick floor. The sound hasn't yet finished reverberating in my earpiece as the two Stormbringers have turned to face it. Curse has time to fire off one flak round, a five-inch shell of superheated titanium shrapnel, before my brother has tapped him quickly on the shoulder and motioned towards the portals on the wall that take the travelers to the crow's nest and roof of the giant, looming tower. Ben leaps through the portal leading to the roof, and Curse is hot on his heels.

At first glance, it looks like my brother has just doomed himself and his teammate. There is no safe way down, not without choosing between a fifty-foot drop or the angry guns of your opponents baying for your blood. But those in the know are aware of one way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. It's risky, and crude at best, but it's the only chance they have.

Ben knows he has to do it, and he knows Curse knows he has to do it, but he still has to ask.

"Redeemer jump?"

Blink and you'll miss it but the two men share an uneasy glance. It's an awkward apology and forgiveness speech in the miniscule space of mercifully brief eye contact, and then Curse turns away and hefts the twenty-pound Redeemer onto one shoulder, just as the Salem's Dragoons materialized through the portal, weapons at the ready.

"Do it!" Ben shouts, condemning his teammate, his wingman, his battle-forged brother to a life five years shorter. Redeemer trauma is ugly stuff, make no mistake, harder on the psyche than anything else a Tournament player can endure, and the decision is not made lightly. But once made, it is not gone back upon, and Curse doesn't even flinch as he points the Redeemer at the ground and vaporizes himself and the entire Salem's Dragoons team with one trigger pull.

Don't ask me how they do it, but Liandri does something to each player's armour such that it becomes completely impervious when met with bullets, lasers, focused plasma, or explosions fired or triggered by their own teammates. There are a hundred other miracles of technology Liandri has brought the world that I will never understand, but this one allows my brother to jump off his opponent's tower, their flag on his back, and ride the nuclear shockwave of a Redeemer warhead halfway across the playing field and impossibly close to winning the game for the defending champions. He hits the ground, hard, and starts running. Silently, I hope the chems and stims are enough to help him ignore the horrid jarring his knees have just endured.

Immediately in front of my brother, the Stormbringer base kicks into overdrive. The team that was digging in and baring its teeth for damage control is now a tiger, starved and desperate, kicking forth with every last burst of speed to secure a kill in the dying moments of its life. Curse and Raptor hurdle forth in regenerated bodies to meet their leader at his side. Twilight punishes a Dragoon's attempt at a rocket barrage with a neat hole through his head. Panic and Mage take up positions outside of the tower and start loosing their own covering fire, thunderous barrages of heavy artillery that turn the landscape, and at least one Dragoon, into wet mulch. I keep one eye fixated on the clock.

Thirty seconds left. The home flag seems impossibly far away. It must be a mile, at least.

Twenty-five seconds left. The fat bastard beside me licks gen-mod chicken grease off his fingers. I find a way to hate him even more.

Twenty seconds left. An impossibly lucky shot from a sniper rifle enters behind Ben's kneecap, where the armour is weak. The twelve-millimetre round punches a hole clear through armour plating and bone alike, effectively crippling my brother. He might not even feel it, but the tendons are gone, ruined, and the already-damaged leg is useless. It's a brilliant ploy. A clean headshot would have killed him outright and dropped the flag, but this merely slows him to a crawl. He can't pass off the flag, can't do anything but limp home, and with seventeen seconds left, he might not make it. Twilight avenges the shot by claiming the sniper that scored it, but it's a hollow victory.

Fifteen seconds left. Raptor and Curse are upon Ben now and both men abandon their guns to take an arm of my brother's around their own shoulders. Together, the three men make a break for home.

Ten seconds left. Panic and Mage step further forward onto the battlefield and seem to increase their fire tenfold. The determined pair of defenders let their defiance loose in every rocket, every flak grenade they send howling across the void into the advancing Dragoons. Panic eats a rocket. Mage doesn't even blink as what's left of his partner spatters across his face.

Five seconds left. More sniper fire decapitates Raptor. The Stormbringers will spend days watching the replay trying to find out the hole in their defensive game that allowed for such effective sniping to decimate them. For now, Twilight answers the killshot with one of her own.

Four seconds. They won't make it.

Three seconds. Curse, with the fury of a man possessed, lifts my brother up, armour and all, as if he were no heavier than a baseball, takes a sure step forward, and heaves him bodily towards the red flag.

Two seconds. It.

One second. Is.

No seconds.

Good.

The time buzzer, usually lost in the din of an excited crowd, echoes across the stadium loud enough to be an air raid siren. As the ugly sound finishes echoing off the plasteel and concrete walls and girders of the Liandri Coliseum, a single and impossibly loud cheer erupts immediately from every single person in attendance.

The Stormbringers have won. The Stormbringers have defended their title. The Stormbringers are once more the champions.

And only they know how close they came to losing.


End file.
